But then spring came, and it was warm outside and light in the morning, and the wind was soothing and welcome.
Tommy came a few times from Mørk and stood there with me. He was well wrapped up, but he didn’t smoke. He never had. On account of his father. And then he stopped coming. I don’t remember why. I don’t remember much of what he said. I don’t remember much of what I said, either. Or if we said anything important. I certainly hadn’t seen him since, not before that morning in September, on the bridge between the mainland and Ulvøya in Oslo, and it was thirty-five years between then and now. We moved from Mørk as soon as they let me out of the Bunker. My mother couldn’t get away soon enough. Early one morning, before anyone was up, we stowed all our possessions on the flatbed of a truck, tied them down and drove away. We didn’t say goodbye to anyone.
Even if Tommy didn’t come any more, I wasn’t always on my own outside the hospital. Fredrik came too, pretty often as time passed, and smoked next to me. It was because of me he had started, or to be more accurate, he had started because then he would have a more valid reason to stand where I stood, when I was standing there, by the entrance to the hospital. If he smoked. That was his reasoning, and especially at the beginning it was terrible to hear him coughing. Jesus Christ. He must be a little mad, I thought. And he was. That was why he was here. It was why I was here too.
He told me about his mother. He was an only child, his father died when he was five years old. He loved his mother. And she loved him. She had given her life to Fredrik, and he had accepted it willingly, and yet, she was everything, and he was nothing.
‘But if she’s given you her life, how can she be everything and you nothing.’
‘That’s what’s so damn strange,’ he said. ‘I can’t work it out. I’ve tried and tried,’ he said, ‘but I can’t work it out.’ He must have been fifteen years older than me, and I was the only person he spoke to. He hardly even spoke to the doctors. ‘All they want is to send me home,’ he said, ‘but I don’t want to go home. I’m better off here.’
We had a kind of telephone booth in the ward. Not like the wonderful red ones in the streets of Oslo, but a soundproof chamber with a Plexiglas window, so that those on the outside could see the person inside, but not hear what he was saying.
Every evening Fredrik called his mother.
‘I have to clock in,’ he said, and I was sure he was joking, but he wasn’t, and I said:
‘Do you really have to. You’re more than thirty years old.’ And then he said:
‘Are you mad. Of course I have to, what would it be like if I didn’t.’ We often said that to each other, are you mad, this or that, and then we laughed, but he wasn’t trying to be funny.
After he had been on the phone for a few minutes, I could see through the Plexiglas how he started to chew his lip, and then the snot started running, and finally he was squeezing his eyes and crying, and not how a man would cry, if a man cries at alclass="underline" in a controlled, restrained way without any gestures. But when Fredrik cried, his mouth opened wide and his face split into two, like the face of a child does when it plays in the road, maybe hopscotch, or skipping, and suddenly falls and grazes its knee on the tarmac, and the mouth becomes one big, black gorge. I have seen it happen many times and heard the silent gasp before the wails begin. I am pretty sure that Fredrik was wailing, but he was inside the soundproof booth, and if he really was, I couldn’t hear him. Behind the Plexiglas his mouth opened without a sound and was wide and dark as a deep dish, and it looked very, very strange.
In retrospect it’s not easy to say in what way you were mad. I knew why I ended up in the Bunker, that’s not it. I tried to hang myself in the woodshed, I can well remember it: the firewood inside, birch mostly, but also ash and spruce, and I remember thinking that birch was superior by a mile to any other kind of wood when you lit a fire in the stove or in the fireplace. It didn’t crackle the way spruce did sending red and yellow sparks flying into the room and making dark brown burn marks on the floor, and birch also burned more slowly. On the other hand, birch was more expensive, if you didn’t have a wood yourself and had to buy it. That’s what I was thinking about. I stood there with the coarse rope in my hand pondering the economic aspects of wood heating as I was looking up at the ceiling to see if there was anything that would not break when I kicked away the stool I had brought with me.
But I couldn’t remember why I tried to hang myself. Actually I couldn’t remember being mad, either. Or ill. If that sounds better. In which way I was ill. On the contrary, I felt normal, I felt that the world was as I knew it, and I too was the way I was supposed to be. I felt I was in tune with the world. I really did. But something must have been wrong, because they kept me in the Bunker for almost four months and didn’t let me out until summer was at the door looking in.
But then a thought came to to me.
Suddenly I remembered a pack of cigarettes, twenty Marlboro, a white cardboard packet with black lettering and a red flip top, and how I was always skint at the time because I didn’t have a job like Tommy did, I was at the gymnas, and my mother didn’t earn a great deal as a teacher, and she definitely didn’t keep me in cigarettes. So someone must have bought the pack for me, and this someone had done that at the kiosk in the hospital foyer. There was something about those cigarettes, they had a terribly bitter taste, and it scared me and I wondered if some mistake had been made in the factory, or if they had added too much of an ingredient they used in the tobacco, a secret ingredient in fact, and the factory workers had to sign a statement saying they had no knowledge of it, and the purpose of this ingredient was of course to make me more than usually addicted to this particular brand of cigarette, and now the cigarettes in precisely this pack, produced not so many weeks before, had become so toxic they could kill me. And it must have been Tommy who bought me the pack because my mother would never have done it, no matter how much money she earned or didn’t earn, nor anyone else in the close family, which wasn’t that big anyway, but they were all of them Bible Belt Christians and fierce opponents of the disgusting habit I had acquired. And so the big question was: did Tommy know about the ingredient and what it might lead to if there was too much of it. Did he know what might happen to me. I couldn’t rule it out. That was my thinking then. That I couldn’t rule it out. That Tommy knew. And after two cigarettes I felt really ill and threw the pack in a skip behind the hospital, so no one else would find it and suffer harm, a tramp maybe or a desperate thirteen-year-old girl rooting around, and I waited until I was absolutely sure that this particular batch, manufactured on this particular day, a Monday probably, was out of circulation before buying another pack. It took all I had. For I was addicted because of this special ingredient. It required willpower. But I did it. And it was after that week that Fredrik started smoking. When I started again. There wasn’t much else I would rather do than smoke back then, so I didn’t take the opportunity to stop. I may have had regrets about that later, but it wasn’t an option at the time.